Author: intersectionalalien

Hi hello people of earth/space/cyberspace,
intersectional alien here.
I’m still trying to figure out my place on this earth.
I like intersectional feminism, feminism in popular culture, LGBTQ+, refugee rights, veganism, mental health, nihilism, travelling, unlearning institutional conditioning, good tunes and consuming and creating stories.

In my initial post (and in my thought process that lead towards creating this project) I made an assumption of tropes based on my limited viewing of anime. My experience of anime is limited due to the few animes I’ve watched being quite blatantly sexist or very male-centric. Considering there are actually more than 10 000 animes in existence, it’s fair to say that my observations were more generalised assumptions. But do my assumptions hold up?

Well, according to Western analyses of anime, they actually (mostly) do. In a 2014 article, Aja Romano wrote an article for The Daily Dot, where they stated the following:

“The more typical and “traditional” attempt to portray both crossdressing and genderqueer identity in Japanese storytelling narratives has usually been to make it a joke. This includes the old standby of using flamboyantly gay people who crossdress, or drag itself, as humor. Even though drag can often be a transformative process…

Through my small introduction to anime, I noticed a pattern in the depiction of gender ambiguous characters. It was particularly the character Grell, from Black Butler, that was the catalyst towards my epiphany that the depiction of gender fluid and transgender characters generally involved them appearing to be crazy, dangerous, flamboyant and funny.

Cue the comments from this clip:

Ok, so before we get into my project proposal, let’s breakdown gender. Gender is a social construct enforced on us from the moment we are born and marked as ‘male’ or ‘female’. It shapes the way we are treated and the way we are taught to behave. There are many different societies and cultures that hold different values and norms around gender, so it can be constructed in many varied forms.

In the Western context, I know that systematic understandings of gender identity are in binary/cisnormative terms. Just look at the most recent census for Australia…

Following my viewing of Ladies Room, I’ve reflected on my assumptions and epiphanies from this experience. I’ve also read back on my first post in order to critically analyse my initial reaction.

Let’s start with my initial feeling towards the Ladies Room series – disappointment. While the series certainly had elements of feminism to it (discussing topic areas like casual sex, abortion, periods, developing independent lives/careers and centring around the friendship of two women), to me it wasn’t the “wild” show that it projected itself to be to a global audience (via Youtube), nor the “feminist stoner comedy” it projected to be to a Western audience (via SBS). I was also introduced to Ladies Room through it’s comparison to Broad City, and considering how relatively queer friendly Broad City is, I was particularly curious to see if Ladies Room would also go down that path…and it didn’t.

I come from a background of journal writing, studying sociology, being introverted and having social anxiety. All these experiences have (for better or worse) taught me to be the observer, to be critical of the observer and to reflect on the observer. They have also sparked an interest in me to seek out autoethnographic accounts, though I was unaware of the concept itself until recently.

I find autoethnographies to provide great insights into different cultures, ways of thinking and experiences that are invaluable to challenging my truths and forcing me to continue approaching everything with a simultaneous openness and critical analysis (a recent and very interesting find is the perspective of a trans man discussing his experiences of white male privilege).

An autoethnography is both a process and a product, as it “treats research as a political, socially-just and socially-conscious act” (Ellis et al, 2011), and these acts are constantly…